Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is a version of the Internet Protocol that is designed to succeed Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) that has been in operation since 1981. The main reason for the redesign of the Internet Protocol was the IPv4 address exhaustion. As of January 2011, a report projected that the IPv4 address pool would be exhausted before the end of 2011.
IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It uses a 128-bit address, whereas IPv4 uses only 32 bits. This expansion provides considerable flexibility in allocating addresses and routing traffic. It also eliminates the primary need for network address translation (NAT), which was deployed in order to alleviate IPv4 address exhaustion. Continue reading Is Your Business Ready to Move to IPv6?